Notes From the Underground : It’s a Dirty Job, But Someone Has to Keep the Sewers Clear

Working in the city’s sewers is not a job for the squeamish.

Ask William P. Thacker, who earns a living in and around sewers in the western San Fernando Valley.

One day, Thacker got an emergency call: a grease clog was causing raw sewage to back up onto Ventura Boulevard in Encino.

“I took the cover off the manhole and it was full of rats--there must have been 200 of them,” Thacker said. The rats scattered and, undaunted, Thacker climbed down the manhole and cleaned out the sewer line.

Thacker’s co-worker, Hernando Cabeza, has been bitten by a black widow spider and splashed with raw sewage, and has faced swarms of cockroaches and rats the size of small cats during his 8-year career as a sewer man.

Cabeza, 30, and Thacker, 39, are among about 56 city employees who work for the Wastewater Collection Division, a little-known echelon of the city’s Public Works Department.

Keeping the Flow

Their job is to keep the flow going in two vast, separate networks of tunnels beneath the San Fernando Valley: sewers, which transport wastewater to treatment plants, and storm drains, which carry rainwater to the sea.

Though their job may lack prestige and public attention, it does not lack importance.

“Without us, there wouldn’t be a city,” said Ed Limon, who has worked in the sewers for 24 years, following in his father’s footsteps. “Every time somebody uses a restroom, washes their hands, washes clothes, takes a shower or does the dishes, they’re using the system.”

It is a job so unsavory that many prospective employees “walk right out of the interview” when work conditions are described, said Warren BeMiller, who heads sewer operations in the West Valley. Others quit after they get their first heady whiff of the job.

Without the storm drains, the city would flood every time it rains.

A sewer line runs beneath practically every street in the Valley; laid end to end, the 2,600 miles of pipes would stretch to Honolulu. Every day, the pipes carry about 150 million gallons of sewage from tens of thousands of homes and businesses to treatment plants, officials say.

The Valley is crisscrossed by about 400 miles of storm drains, some of which are 10 feet tall, big enough to drive a truck through.

Thanks to machines, waste-water workers don’t have to go down in the sewers as much as they used to.

Sewer workers can often be seen in busy intersections wielding machinery that snakes through the sewer lines to clear them.

Sometimes, workers use high-velocity water streams to flush out the lines while using long poles to poke at clogs of grease that have hardened to the consistency of cheese.

Giant Roto-Rooter-type machines churn through tree roots that, if left to grow, would choke off sewer flow in hillside areas.

Last Resort

But when those methods fail to clear a blockage--for instance a large chunk of wood--the workers must wade into dank, slimy, subterranean tunnels filled with raw sewage to remove the obstruction. Some of the tunnels lie as deep as 40 feet below ground and have pipes 8 feet in diameter, officials said.

Workers who have to venture below ground are faced with the unforgettable odor of fermenting sewage and rancid grease.

“When I first started I would gag, but you get used to it,” BeMiller said. “You try to stand upwind of it so it won’t blow on you.”

Art Grijalva, a 29-year-old wastewater worker, said he just breathes with his mouth closed to minimize the smell, a trick he learned while changing his younger brothers’ diapers.

But sewer workers say they have a harder time adjusting to scurrying rats and insects.

“Sometimes you’ll be working down there and a rat will go flying by,” Limon said. “Spiders dangle beside you. You feel them in your pant leg.”

Cabeza, an antique collector and avid student of the Middle Ages when he is not working in sewers, once encountered 4-inch cockroaches while working with a night crew in downtown Los Angeles.

“The rats were bad but the cockroaches were worse,” Cabeza said. “We would literally be yelling not in terror . . . well, sort of in terror,” he added sheepishly. “We would constantly be knocking cockroaches off our faces and backs.”

Sewer workers sometimes even accidentally swallow sewage, which accounts for a saying among the crews: “You’re not a sewer worker until you get it in your mouth.”

“I’ve swallowed the stuff and gotten sprayed with it,” Cabeza said. “It happens to everybody. But I’m still here.”

Sewer work is not only unpleasant, it also is dangerous. Sewage creates lethal hydrogen sulfide, a gas that has killed six workers in Los Angeles-area sewers in the past 25 years, officials say.

A worker climbing into a city sewer wears coveralls, a hard hat and a safety harness attached to a strong rope held by co-workers who remain above ground. He carries a portable oxygen tank, gas mask and a device to warn of unsafe gases or explosives. Blowers are installed at manholes to expel some of the dangerous gases.

While working above ground, sewer workers must keep an eye on traffic and be ready to jump out of the path of a careening car. Sewers at the busiest intersections, along Ventura Boulevard, for example, are cleaned at night, when traffic is lightest, BeMiller said.

Illegal Dumping

But perhaps the greatest danger is the caustic chemicals, heavy metals, acids and other hazardous materials illegally dumped into sewers by companies trying to save money.

Some workers said they worry about getting cancer, although sewer officials said there is no indication that they run a special risk of contracting the disease, or AIDs, another sewer worker concern.

Cabeza and crew say they can tell what’s in a neighborhood just by looking at the sewage.

When they look down and see syringes, soiled linens and rubber gloves in the murky slime, for instance, they know a hospital is near. Grease indicates a restaurant’s presence, Limon said.

Sewer workers are surprised to find a high concentration of grease in sewer lines near convalescent homes, Limon said. On one recent night, it took Limon and two partners nearly an hour and 4,500 gallons of water to flush out a grease-clogged sewer line near a Canoga Park convalescent home.

“I thought old people were supposed to have a low-fat diet,” Limon said.

Wastewater workers also can learn a lot about society by the booty that turns up in the Valley’s sewers.

Tales of alligators living in the sewers are folklore. But people dump just about every imaginable type of object in sewers, including bowling balls, rolls of carpet and furniture, Cabeza said.

Other things end up in sewers by accident. Workers frequently find coins rubbed thin and sharp as razor blades by the grit of the sewers. Sewer crews get panicked calls from people whose diamonds have popped out of ring settings or whose dentures have fallen down drains or toilets. The lost items can sometimes be recovered by installing grates to catch them before they wash downstream.

Limon once found a large, loose diamond while cutting roots out of a sewer line. “It got hung up on the rod I was working with,” Limon said. “I just happened to look up at the right time. In those days, everything the crew found was split three ways. I wanted it for my wife so I bought the other guys out and gave it to my wife. . . . And she lost it too. It came out of the setting.

“It was an unlucky diamond. It’s probably still floating in the sewer somewhere.”

Even more booty turns up in storm drains. “People usually throw things down here they don’t want anybody to see,” Thacker said.

City crews have found shotguns, pistols, live mortar rounds, drugs, jewelry, pornographic films, sheep and cows in storm drains.

“Occasionally, we get calls from the Police Department to meet them so they can search storm drains near where a crime has been committed for discarded weapons,” BeMiller said.

Wastewater workers are frequently called to retrieve purses, keys or wallets dropped down storm-drain catch basins. The odds of success rise with the advent of dry, sunny days.

Although they are safer than sewers, storm drains are not without dangers--particularly rattlesnakes, poison oak and chemicals that have been illegally dumped.

The sewer system operates primarily by gravity flow--pipes laid on grades--supplemented by two pumping plants in North Hollywood, and one each in Tarzana and Granada Hills, said Robert Parrish, a high-ranking city wastewater official. Most of the sewer lines run north to south and east to west. The largest line runs along Victory Boulevard starting at Valley Circle Boulevard and ending at the Donald C. Tillman Plant in the Sepulveda basin in Van Nuys, BeMiller said. The water is used for irrigation.

The oldest sewer pipes in the Valley are about 60 years old, about half the age of some of the downtown lines, making them less prone to breakdowns and easier to maintain.

“Out here, it’s like heaven,” Cabeza said.

The Tillman plant opened in 1984 to take the strain off overtaxed city sewer lines and the Hyperion Treatment plant in El Segundo, Parrish said.

“If you flush the toilet when you get up in the morning in Chatsworth, it would probably take about three hours to get to the Tillman Plant,” said Bob Van Ark, a city engineer.

What doesn’t wind up in the Tillman plant goes to Hyperion, a trip that spans nearly 50 miles and takes more than 12 hours, Parrish said.

Peak sewage flows occur in the morning as people get ready for work, and in the evening as they come home, shower and prepare for dinner.

Like city garbage collectors, wastewater workers earn 5% over the base salary for city public works employees because of the job’s dangerous and distasteful aspects, BeMiller said. But even with the bonus, the pay is modest. Top-scale salaries range from about $20,000 to $28,000, BeMiller said.

Sewer workers are used to jokes and questions about their line of work, but view their profession like a worker in any other worker views his.

“How could a person be a surgeon and cut open brains?” BeMiller shot back to the question of how he deals with the job.

“Hey, everybody’s got to have a job,” added Elton Juniel, a 25-year-old Van Nuys resident, as he worked in the hot sun, clearing roots out of a Woodland Hills sewer.

But Thacker, a veteran, put sewer work into his own special perspective: “This is nothing compared to Vietnam.”